The Italian Renaissance

The French term “Renaissance” (literally meaning a “renewal” or “rebirth”) is now universally used to designate the literary and artistic revival in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. In 1546 Paolo Giovio referred to the fourteenth century as “that happy century in which Latin letters are considered to have been born again (renatae),” anticipating this way of referring to this period of cultural renewal. Certain historians, most notably Jacob Burckhardt, argued that the Renaissance gave birth to the modern era. It was in this era, Burckhardt claimed, that human beings first began to think of themselves as individuals. In many ways, Burckhardt’s definition of the Renaissance in purely individualist terms is highly questionable. However, in one sense, he is unquestionably correct: something novel and exciting developed in Renaissance Italy, which proved capable of exercising a fascination over generations of thinkers.

It is not entirely clear why Italy became the cradle of this brilliant new movement in the history of ideas. A number of factors have been identified as having some bearing on the question.

Scholastic theology – the major intellectual force of the medieval period – was never particularly influential in Italy. Although many Italians achieved fame as theologians (including Thomas Aquinas and Gregory of Rimini), they generally lived and worked in northern Europe. There was thus an intellectual vacuum in Italy during the fourteenth century. Vacuums tend to get filled – and Renaissance humanism managed to occupy this particular gap.

Italy was generously provided with visible and tangible reminders of its classic past. The ruins of ancient Roman buildings and monuments were scattered throughout the land and aroused interest in the civilization of ancient Rome at the time of the Renaissance. These remains of an earlier civilization prompted Renaissance thinkers to recover the vitality of classical Roman culture at a time that was widely considered to be culturally arid and barren.

In 1453, the great city Constantinople finally fell to Islamic invaders, leading to an exodus of Greek-speaking intellectuals westward, looking for safety. Many of these émigrés settled in Italian cities and brought a knowledge of the Greek language and the Greek classics to Italy, thus giving further stimulus to the Renaissance cultural agenda.

A central component of the worldview of the Italian Renaissance was a return to the cultural glories of antiquity, and a marginalization of the intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages. Renaissance writers had scant regard for the latter, regarding them as outweighed by the greater achievements of antiquity. What was true of culture in general was also true of theology: Renaissance theologians considered the writings of the early Christian period as being far more interesting and important than the theological writings of the Middle Ages, both in substance and in style. Indeed, the Renaissance may partly be seen as a reaction against the type of approach increasingly associated with the faculties of arts and theology of northern European universities. Irritated by the technical nature of the language and discussions of the scholastics, the writers of the Renaissance simply bypassed them altogether. In the case of Christian theology, the key to the future lay in a direct engagement with the text of Scripture and the writings of the patristic period. We shall explore this matter further shortly (see pp. 123–6).

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